Amaryliss by another light
To avoid disorientation I need to begin by pointing out that the perspective for this image is from almost directly below the flower. Yesterday I photographed with window light. Other than placing the flower near the window and slightly manipulating the light on the background nothing else was done to prepare the subject. For this image I made use of two lights. The key light was a 15×15″ softbox place about 2′ from the flower on camera left. The second light was a portable strobe with a 20° grid placed as nearly behind the flower as possible (slightly outside the top of the frame) to provide backlighting. The camera lens was shielded from the backlight by the table upon which the flower was sitting. I used a polarizing filter on the camera lens to reduce the amount of direct reflection in the highlights. This allowed for more detail in the highlight areas with only a small area on the top edges of the right blossom getting entirely blown out. I also used a gold reflector on camera right to fill in the shadow area on the right blossom. An interesting secondary effect of using the reflector is that the background (ceiling) was lit by two distinct light sources…the reflector warmed the left side of the background and window light created a cooler effect on the right.
Relatively speaking, creating this image was much more labor intensive than the one captured yesterday. Was it worth the effort? Let me know what you think.